Chapter Twenty-Seven of 'Nature of the Beast'- Secrets and Security
Chapter Twenty-Six.
Title: Nature of the Beast (27/40 to 43)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco (eventual), Ron/Hermione, Lucius/Narcissa
Warnings: Creature fic (Draco is a Veela), angst, some violence
Rating: R
Summary: Draco Malfoy knows how the world is supposed to go; he is a dominant Veela, with a submissive mate. It’s rather a surprise to find out that his mate is Harry Potter. It’s much more of one to find out that Harry, having been raised by Muggles, does not know how the world is supposed to go.
Author’s Notes: This story is going to be probably somewhere between twenty-five and thirty chapters.
Chapter One..
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Seven-Secrets and Security
“Are you all right?” Harry reached out and clasped down on one of Draco’s hands, trying at one and the same time to hold him there and reassure him. Draco’s eyes were brilliant, too brilliant, like swirling pools of silver light, and there was an unnatural twitch running through his wings. Despite the way he had risen from the chair a minute ago, Harry didn’t think he was about to fly.
“I’m-I will be,” said Draco. He shut his eyes for a moment, shut away the disturbing silver light, and left Harry to hold onto him and breathe quietly. A second later, he opened his eyes. Then he closed them again. “But you need to explain what you mean about living in a cupboard.”
“The Dursleys have, had, I don’t know which,” said Harry. He didn’t know if the Dursleys had ever gone back to live in Number Four Privet Drive. “A cupboard under their stairs. That’s where they put me. I spent time in there when I used magic. When they didn’t want to look at me.”
“Which would have been all the time, I suppose,” said Draco, and his voice was flat and hard.
“Yes,” said Harry softly.
“I don’t understand them,” Draco whispered, harsh, tense, and his wings jerked, as if someone was holding onto a rope and pulling against them. “How could they turn against you? And it’s not just because it’s you, and you’re my mate,” he added fretfully, as if he thought Harry would misunderstand him, argue against him. “Although that’s part of it. How could anyone turn against a child like that?”
Harry relaxed. He had hoped Draco would say something like that. Yes, he knew a Veela would be outraged about any abuse or insult used against its mate, but Harry wanted to remind Draco that anyone in that situation would have been abused, hurt, in danger. Harry wanted to be valued for himself, for being human, not just for being Draco’s mate.
Although that did rather raise the question of what Draco would think of Harry calling himself human, and making it something different from a Veela.
Harry went on with the story, because he thought Draco might try to buffet it out of him with his wings if Harry hesitated much longer. “They put me in there when they wanted to punish me, too, though. For ten years, that was all I knew. Then I got the Hogwarts letter, and I realized that magic was real. The weird things I could do had a name. And they’d known, too, or at least my uncle and aunt did. I have no idea about my cousin.”
“They kept it from you,” Draco whispered, in the same soft tone he had used to whisper endearments to Harry. It was a little unnerving, actually. “They kept your heritage from you, and they made you think you were-what? Different from them? Abnormal?”
“A freak.” The word still dried out Harry’s throat when he tried to say it, as ridiculous as that was. “That was the word they used.”
“It isn’t a word that you’ll call yourself in front of me,” said Draco.
Harry laughed once, and startled himself in doing it, although perhaps not Draco, from the thoughtful way Draco watched him. “I think I can safely promise you that I will never use it again. I only used it now because you asked me.”
Draco spread his wings and fluttered the tips in that little movement that Harry was coming to understand as part of preening, or flirting. They might not be all that separate, for Veela. Then Draco’s smile faded, and he said, “Good. I’m glad that you could say it once. What else did they do to you?”
“Before or after I got my Hogwarts letter?” Harry shrugged. “It wasn’t as bad, after, but there were still some bad times.”
“You’ll tell me everything,” said Draco, with an assurance so calm that it wasn’t even arrogance. “But right now, I want to know about before. I think I might know a little more about after, based on some rumors that went around.”
“All right.” Harry paused for a moment. He was remembering what had happened. He wanted to tell the truth, he wanted to give Draco some idea of what he had gone through, but he also didn’t want to exaggerate it or make it seem worse than it had been.
“You might as well tell me.” Draco’s voice was very gentle, and Harry looked up to see him leaning forwards again, his wings trembling now and his voice also vibrating, on the edge of a croon. “Think of it that way, and then you’ll see why it has to be so. We could stop talking here, or you could give me bare facts and nothing else, but that wouldn’t be true to what’s happening between us, and you know it.”
“I do want to give you the facts,” said Harry. “What I felt about it, but I want to tell you the truth, not just what I felt.”
*
Draco caught one of Harry’s hands and held it to his lips. He wondered if he could show Harry how much that desire meant to him, and at the same time, how little he needed the truth and the truth only.
“What you felt about it is the most important part of the truth to me,” he said, and turned his head to the side so he could rub his cheek against Harry’s palm. The way that Harry’s breath caught and his eyes widened was a very encouraging sign. Draco hid a smile and kept massaging Harry’s hand with his own. “This would be horrible if it had happened to anyone, but it does matter more to me that it happened to you. Do you understand?”
Harry hesitated a long time before he nodded. Draco felt a burst of affection. Harry was caught between believing-knowing-he was important to Draco, and wanting to think he was the same as everyone else. It was probably the same conflict that had bothered him during the war, Draco imagined. Even if he was prophesied to defeat the Dark Lord, Harry wanted to think of himself as ordinary.
“So,” said Draco. “Tell me what happened.”
“The cupboard,” said Harry. “Calling me freak. Not telling me the truth about magic, although I was only angry afterwards when I found out about that. Oh, and calling my parents names and never telling me the truth about them, either.” His eyes were fierce. Draco squeezed his hand again, and listened in enchantment as Harry took a deep breath and sat up. “My cousin beat me up and made sure I never had friends at school.”
He hesitated and cast a glance at Draco. “In a way, that was the reason we got off on the wrong foot at first, did you know that? I’d never had friends. And then there was Ron, and he actually seemed to like me, and you came in and taunted him. There was no way I was going to listen to you after that.”
Draco sniffed. His feelings about that scene had been transfigured, a little, by the transformation when he had become a Veela, and learning that Harry was his mate. At the same time, he could still feel echoes of irritation. “I was eleven. Spoiled. Stuck up. But I would never have called you a freak.”
Harry rolled his eyes at him. “No, only a liar, a cheat, a-”
“There’s no point in remembering that part of the past,” said Draco hastily. “We both know about it, and we can discuss it any time. But we need to spend more time on this story you’re telling me now, because you’re the only one who knows about it.”
Harry spent some time studying him, and then he nodded, his shoulders relaxing. “You have something there,” he muttered. “All right. They also starved me.”
“Did they?” Draco became aware that his voice had gone high and silvery only when Harry winced a little from it.
“They locked me in the cupboard without food, and they wouldn’t let me eat unless I did chores, sometimes.” Harry sighed. “I survived it, but it’s something that-I don’t like to think about now.” He hesitated. “They put me in a bedroom after they started getting the Hogwarts letters, because they were addressed to the cupboard under the stairs and they hated the thought of someone watching them. But they put the food through a flap at the bottom of the door.”
“Why was that?” Draco made his voice almost coaxing, and Harry leaned towards him, instinctively, Draco thought, his eyes wide.
“Because they didn’t want me eating with them,” Harry said. “And because there were so many locks on the door that it was hard to get it open.”
Draco nodded. He had thought it was something like that. He was pleased that Harry was no longer attempting to conceal the truth from him or soften its impact-he was the one who would have to decide when he had heard as much as he wanted to-and he was shaking with rage that he couldn’t let out because it would tear off the roof of the house.
Or whatever else Harry’s relatives lived in now. Draco had no doubt that he could find them. He was sensitive to everything of his mate’s, and a blood connection would be easy to track.
He swallowed down the rage for now, although it burned his throat, and murmured, “When did you leave them for the last time?”
“When I turned seventeen.” Harry eased back on the chair as though he assumed they didn’t need to be as close now that Draco wasn’t whispering, but Draco seized his hand and shook his head violently. Harry blinked at him, but stayed put. “I had to stay there until then so the blood protections could do their work. And then the Aurors came and took them away to protect them, and I haven’t seen them since.”
His voice made it seem like it was so long ago, but Draco knew it was last summer. Barely a year. He breathed, he swallowed, and then he asked, so softly that his voice drifted and coiled like smoke around the room, “They gave them protection? Why? They were hardly wizards.”
Harry shrugged. He was still holding Draco’s gaze, but he looked a little uncomfortable again. “They were my relatives, and there was some fear that they might be killed by Death Eaters, or Voldemort might kill them to get to me, or something.”
In his voice was the deep relief that Draco didn’t know if he would admit to himself, that he would never have to see them again, whether they were safe or not. It was an emotion Draco couldn’t imagine himself feeling about any of his family, no matter how estranged they became from each other. He was still angry with his mother for bringing in Aloren without telling him, but at least he was sure she would stand behind him. Never treat him like the Dursleys had Harry.
“Do you want them punished?”
Harry didn’t reply immediately, something that pleased Draco. He sat there, staring past Draco’s shoulder, probably entertaining several scenarios in his head. Then he glanced at Draco and shook his head. “There’s part of me that would like it, but then I would feel too guilty. It’s not worth it.”
Draco slowly inclined his head. He could understand that. But he had to do something with this new knowledge and the way that it made his fingernails want to transform into claws. “What do you want, then?”
“You mean, who do I want you to take revenge on?” Harry shifted his weight. “No one. I told you that because I wanted you to know and so it wouldn’t be a secret between us, not because I wanted revenge.”
Because I wanted you to know. Draco listened to the echo of those words for a moment, sweeter than any song, and then he asked, gently, “What do you want? Not revenge. I want to give you something because of what you endured. I have to give you something.” The fire curling inside him, the fire focused on his mate, demanded it.
Harry thought about that for a long moment, long enough that Draco could breathe again. At least that meant he would probably get a serious answer, instead of one that was made up simply so Harry could fend him off.
“I think,” said Harry carefully, “that I’d like a massage.”
Draco’s wings twitched. Not at all what he had thought Harry would choose, but then again, he didn’t know Harry well enough to say what an expected response would be. “Would you?” he asked. “From me, I suppose.” Not that he would have let someone else touch Harry for any reason, right now, but it was nice to see the way Harry gave him a blank look.
“Of course you,” said Harry, and stood up and turned around and willingly removed his shirt for the first time in front of Draco. Well, willingly for the first time that didn’t have to do with immediately putting on another one.
Draco’s wings twitched again. He might have said something, but his mouth was full with his own happiness. He moved towards Harry, who had turned his head to watch him appraisingly over one shoulder.
Harry’s back was crisscrossed with thin, faint scars, ones Draco had noticed before. Now, he thought he knew where some of them came from, and his chest swelled with the need to scream.
But Harry had said that he didn’t want Draco hunting his relatives down. That was reason enough not to do it. Plus the temptation of a chance to touch Harry instead of him squirming to get away was not to be disdained.
“If you only knew how much I’d longed to touch you,” Draco whispered, and began to run his fingers lightly up and down Harry’s shoulders.
“Wouldn’t this be easier if I was lying down on something?” Harry’s muscles had become tense, not at all the result Draco wanted from a massage.
“Yes, of course,” Draco said, and drew his wand and Transfigured the couch into a bed. His eyes wouldn’t leave Harry. Perhaps later he would worry about that. But right now, it was the natural and expected result, and he could feel little tingles of happiness pouring through him.
Most of them were probably his, but he also thought of some of them were coming through the bond.
“Draco?” Harry asked, cocking his head as he walked over to the bed and draped himself onto the silken sheets in the middle, nearly making Draco’s brain slide out his ears with happiness.
“Yes?” Draco whispered, creeping closer, his hands flexing out and trembling with the desire to caress, to touch, and go on touching.
“Why make it a bed instead of just having me lie down on a couch?” Harry rolled to one side on his elbow, and his smile was faint, but real. “Is there a particular reason for that?”
“No sex until you’re ready,” said Draco, because he didn’t know if Harry was actually frightened, but it was something unacceptable if he was. And he wanted Harry to know the truth whether or not he was. “I want to learn you first, to understand you.” His wings were out, and he knew his gait towards the bed was almost a stalk, but at least he didn’t prompt a fear response from Harry now. The glimmer in his eyes was definitely interest. “I conjured a bed because I thought it would be the most comfortable for you. And it’s wider than the couch.”
Harry visibly thought about it for a moment, then shrugged and said, “That’s true.” And he lay down on the bed and trustingly turned his back towards Draco.
Draco covered the rest of the distance with a single beat of his wings, and landed directly beside the bed, crooning. Other than a slight tension in Harry’s shoulders, there was no negative reaction, and Harry relaxed a second later.
“Why did you choose a massage?” Draco whispered as he conjured the soft oil he would use. It was a sort he had often used on himself after a bath. “When you had to know it would mean my hands would be all over you?”
“Because I knew it would mean that your hands were all over me,” Harry said, his voice muffled by the pillow he had his face mashed into. He turned his head to the side, and Draco delicately plucked off his glasses and put them over to the side so that Harry wouldn’t be hurt by having them press into his ears and eyes. Harry blinked in what Draco thought was shock, but he made no objection. “I want to know what that feels like.”
“To learn how to tolerate it?” Draco’s wings shook again. He supposed it might be that. Typical Potter, trying to be a good mate, trying to put everyone before himself, trying to-
“No.” Harry hesitated again, and then said, “Because I might like it, but I don’t know for certain yet.”
Draco leaned forwards and showed him exactly what it felt like, and if his wings were still twitching and his croon was shaking his throat, well, Harry didn’t look disposed to blame him for it.
Chapter Twenty-Eight.
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